Copyright & DMCA policy

1. Our position

2. Why the DMCA does not apply

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act added § 512 to Title 17 of the United States Code. It creates a safe harbour: an online service provider is shielded from monetary liability for user infringement provided it meets conditions, including expeditious removal on receipt of a compliant notice.

Two consequences follow, and both are routinely misunderstood.

• The DMCA does not order anyone to remove anything. It offers a liability shield in exchange for compliance. Removal is the price of the shield, not a legal command.
• The shield is only valuable to a provider exposed to US copyright liability. US statutes are presumed not to apply extraterritorially unless Congress says otherwise — a principle restated by the Supreme Court in Morrison v. National Australia Bank (2010) and RJR Nabisco v. European Community (2016). Section 512 contains no extraterritoriality provision.

VPSDEN has:

• no entity incorporated in the United States,
• no servers, staff or offices in the United States,
• no US bank account or US payment processor,
• no assets in the United States against which a judgment could be enforced.

There is therefore no safe harbour for us to lose and no US forum with jurisdiction over us. A § 512 notice has no legal force here.

3. What we do with complaints

1. We acknowledge receipt within 24 hours, with a link to this page.
2. We forward the complaint to the customer for information, redacting your contact details unless you ask us not to.
3. We take no action on the content, the instance, or the account.
4. We do not disclose customer information in response to a complaint. We could not identify a customer to you even if we wished to — we hold no name, address or payment instrument.
5. We do not forward repeat notices to our upstreams, and we ask that you do not either. Our transit providers have no more obligation here than we do.

4. For rights holders

If you hold rights in material hosted on our infrastructure and want it removed, the route that works is:

1. Identify the jurisdiction. Our regions are Iceland, Netherlands, Switzerland, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Panama, Seychelles and Malaysia. Write to [email protected] with the IP address and a timestamp and we will tell you which one, at no charge and without needing an order.
2. Retain counsel in that jurisdiction and obtain an order from its courts.
3. Serve the order in accordance with our law enforcement guide. We will comply promptly and fully.

Kuala Lumpur is the exception and you should read it before you spend money on counsel. Malaysia has a statutory notice-and-takedown route, so step 2 does not apply there. See section 5 below.

We will not obstruct a valid order, we do not charge for compliance, and we will not tip off a customer where the order prohibits it. What we will not do is act on a letter — in every region but Malaysia.

5. Malaysia: a statutory notice route

Our Kuala Lumpur region does not work like the other eight, and we would rather say so than have a customer discover it after buying on the strength of the opposite claim.

Sections 43B to 43I of the Malaysian Copyright Act 1987, inserted by the Copyright (Amendment) Act 2012, create an intermediary safe harbour with a notification procedure attached. Under section 43H a copyright owner notifies the service provider directly; to keep the safe harbour the provider must remove or disable access to the material within 48 hours of receiving a compliant notification. That is a fixed statutory clock, not the "expeditious" standard used in the United States, and in that respect it is stricter than § 512.

The customer's remedy is section 43I: a counter-notification, on receipt of which we restore the material. We will forward every section 43H notification to the affected customer immediately, we will tell you the counter-notification deadline, and we will restore on a valid counter-notification without asking you to justify it.

6. EU regions and the Digital Services Act

Three of our regions — Amsterdam, Bucharest and Sofia — are in the European Union, so Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 applies to the service we offer there. Article 16 obliges us to run a channel through which anyone can report content they say is illegal, and to deal with what arrives on its merits. Article 16(2) fixes what a report has to carry before it counts, in this order:

1. a sufficiently substantiated explanation of the reasons why the material is alleged to be illegal;
2. a clear indication of its exact electronic location — a URL, or whatever else locates it precisely;
3. the name and email address of the person reporting, except for reports concerning offences under Articles 3 to 7 of Directive 2011/93/EU;
4. a statement that the person reporting believes in good faith that the information is accurate and complete.

A report carrying all four is treated as putting us on actual knowledge. A report missing one gets a reply saying which. An assertion that a work is infringing, with nothing behind it, does not clear the threshold, and nothing in the DSA requires removal on assertion. Where we do act, the customer receives a statement of reasons under Article 17 and can appeal to us and then to an out-of-court dispute settlement body.

Our designated DSA point of contact is [email protected].

If DSA exposure concerns you as a customer, do not host in our EU regions. That is precisely the kind of trade-off the Jurisdiction Matrix exists to make visible.

7. For customers

A copyright complaint about your instance does not put your account at risk. You will receive it for information, you are under no obligation to us to respond, and no strike is recorded — outside Malaysia there is no repeat-infringer policy here, because there is no safe harbour that would require one. In Kuala Lumpur a section 43H notification does start a 48-hour clock, and you should read section 5.

What we ask you to understand:

• A binding local order binds us. We comply with it, in every region. Choose your jurisdiction on that assumption.
• Your domain is a separate attack surface. A .com is administered by a US registry that will act on a US court order regardless of where your server is. Consider .is, .ch or .li.
• Our AUP still applies. Copyright is not on the prohibited list; four other things are.

8. Common questions